Chapter Seventy-Nine. The Second Day
CHAPTER
SEVENTY-NINE
The Second Day
I spent most of that night supporting the chief engineer in overhauling Locke’s boat. After a mercifully short argument, the captain had insisted that it be retrofitted to properly house Fidelity, the machine intelligence that she had come to rely upon to guide her in her quest for the monster.
This, it turned out, was a massive pain in the ass.
Machine intelligences are in their own way as voracious as the Leviathan, although what they hunger for is energy and processing power.
And since the captain’s boat had been reduced to absolute flinders we couldn’t salvage any of its memory stacks, data veneers, or neural shards.
The ship did have backups of all these things, but in theory they were meant to be reserved for repairs to the main computer, not jammed into a boat so that its autopilot could be upgraded with a more reassuring voice.
When the retrofitting was done, I went to the captain. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find, but when she admitted me to her cabin I found her shirtless and rubbing liniment into her arms. I’d never seen her do anything like it before—it felt strangely humanizing.
Slightly less humanizing was the way she held the bottle out to me and, barely looking at me, said, “Back and shoulders, can’t reach myself,” in that half-order way I was so used to.
It was the first time I’d felt her skin this way, something exposed and needing to be touched instead of something I clawed at furtively or desperately while she either fucked or ignored me or, quite often, both at once.
Her muscles were taut and so knotted they could have been a message in code.
And she was thin. Danger-thin. When-was-the-last-time-you-remembered-to-eat thin.
“Is this…” I began, then fell silent.
Masseuse is one of the few jobs I’ve managed to avoid in my eclectic, eventful, and ill-planned career, but I did my best. I worked the oil firmly into her shoulders and tried to avoid putting any direct pressure on her spine because even I knew that much, and giving the captain a slipped disc on the very night we caught up with the Mobius Beast would have been …
Well, I suppose in a funny way it would have saved us all.
But I was careful. Or as careful as the captain would let me be given that she was, y’know, driven by an obsession that slipped into monomania and from there into a drive so harsh and pure that it could break planets.
“Harder,” she told me, which was usually my line. Although she followed up with, “Do you think me some porcelain figure in a Stilbon pleasure garden?” which was much more her own idiom.
I tried to obey, because I always tried to obey. But that obeying gave me the courage to finally finish my sentence. “Is this worth it?”
“It does the job, as best it can be done.” She was intentionally misunderstanding me, and we both knew it.
But I screwed my courage to the sticking place and clarified. “Is the hunt worth it?”
“You signed aboard, knowing it may kill you, knowing all you’d gain from it was small pay and a few years’ dodging the flesh-bailiffs. Was that worth it?”
My heart betrayed me and made my lips say “yes” before I could come up with a better answer.
“Well then.”
“You have more to lose than me,” I replied. And I’d felt it before I thought it.
It was the truest and the clearest and the saddest I’d ever heard the captain laugh. “What a life you must think I have.”
It was still a season for doubling down. “I mean it.”
“I have but one thing to lose,” she replied, holding up a single finger in frankly unnecessary illustration. “Which is the only thing I have and the only thing I am.”
Sometimes, you just had to play the part somebody else had written for you. “What thing is that?”
“The chase.”
When I’d eased her aches as best I could, she put her shirt and jacket back on and dismissed me. This, I suspected, would be a night she spent walking the deck and brooding, not one she spent making me kneel and beg and whisper her name.
So I went back to Q, who like the ambassador’s wife never resented my excursions. And she held me in silence, neither of us really able to sleep, until the first watch was called.
On the morning of the second day, the captain summoned us once more before the array and showed us the crypto-lock.
“This”—she pointed at the swirling icon and the genuinely enormous sum of wealth it represented—“is mine, as the Beast is mine. I was the first to call him and will be the last to see him living. But you deserve reward for your labors, and so I say that whoever sights the Beast first on the day he is slain, they shall have the whole of my share of the voyage. And if I call him myself, well then I’ll take this share and all other wealth I have laid by and see it split amongst you all as equals. ”
The question of the cipher and its extremely lucrative payload had been mildly straining the crew ever since the captain had refused to accept Marsh’s call the previous day, but this cheered them.
Her previous betrayal had only affected one of them personally and so, human nature being what it is, it was easily forgotten by the others.
Truelove was almost going to protest, because the one thing as good as being given a ton of money yourself is having a ton of money given to somebody you’re close to who is demonstrably terrible with their personal finances.
But he was still smart enough to know that the bulk of the crew would rather have a chance at the prize than see it already given away to the Wisdomers, so he stayed silent.
It was quite possibly that or get a marlinspike through the skull when he least expected it.
And, let’s remember, it was his religious duty to watch other people die, not to die himself.
For much of the day, we followed the Beast’s trail on a mix of instinct and stochastic extrapolation.
This in itself wasn’t unusual—hunter-barques were tenacious by nature and on this very journey there had been Leviathans we’d hunted for days or, in one case, a full week because no better prospect presented itself.
And so the voyage began to feel—fleetingly—normal.
There we were, a ship full of monster hunters, hunting a monster, the way monster hunters did.
And when we caught it, we’d kill it, and carve it up, and drain its sperm into barrels so we could sell it to be burned in power stations on planets most of us would never walk on.
What could possibly have been more ordinary?
Equally ordinary were the half a dozen or so false alarms and abortive lowerings as a watcher or a machine or some doubly addled combination of the two mistook a flock of Wyrms, or a sprite, or a particularly aggressive-looking cloud for the great horror of Hell’s Heart.
And then …
“There”—it was unmistakably Dawlish this time, and this time the captain didn’t begrudge him the claim—“a spout to prow and starboard, patching coordinates now.”
I was pleased for him. If the captain kept her word—and she still might, I believed then that she still might—her bounty could actually clear him of indenture and give him back some kind of life outside service to his creditors.
“Lower,” the captain inevitably commanded, “all lower. Locke, I shall play harpooneer for you. The Terran may move to a lesser boat.”
So close to the end of our voyage, I didn’t much like the thought of being separated from Q.
I’d been in the sky with the captain exactly once, and while it hadn’t been without its upsides (the sex, I’m talking about the sex) a hunter-boat’s crew worked as a team, and knowing each other’s weights and movements and, well, bodies, was a huge part of the job.
None of us had properly hunted with the captain except maybe Locke, and that would have been long ago.
But there was no questioning the captain. She had a vision, and we were all flying in her wake like Wyrms behind Behemoths.
“Welcome aboard,” said Fidelity cheerily as we all piled in. “I’ll be your copilot, ancillary gunner, strategic advisor, and emotional support for this lowering. If you’d like to play a game or engage in erotic roleplay, just ask.”
“Sorry.” Lobscouse poked his head over the side. “The change of hosting set its training back.”
“You will focus,” the captain told the machine, “on one thing: we hunt the Mobius Beast, which is a great white Leviathan, its carapace scarred from many battles. We are to slay him at all costs and you are to facilitate that. Do you understand?”
I just heard Locke murmur, “Not at all costs, surely,” as Fidelity replied, “No problem!” and without my prompting it closed the canopy over us and started launch procedures.
The chase on the second day was clean—we were still in the Heart, of course, so the skies were still a ruby riot of sulfide clouds and flares of near-infrared lightning, but whatever local conditions had been dominating the day before had passed and we saw the Beast fleeing straight, true, and majestic before us.
In my memory—I’m writing all this from memory and you don’t need that thing with the basketball and the gorilla to tell you that memory is extremely faulty—the Beast was not, in fact, as white as the captain described it.
Its carapace would be best described as mottled, gray in places, white in others, and seeming whitest in all honesty when crusted with ammonia ice, which many Leviathans were.
In a strange way, it was his size that made him seem whitest. Depending on where in the atmosphere you went, Jupiter was either freeze-the-air cold or boil-the-steel hot, and so most Leviathans got a white sheen of ice when they were in the mid-to-upper skies that quickly vaporized away as they descended.
But the Beast was so large and terrible that his icy cuirass froze thick and durable.
Even at these altitudes, which were water-freezing but not sky-freezing, his cloud-venting armor had the depth to keep it frozen for years to come.